To date businesses such as restaurants, cafes, pubs and hotels, which are in the business of providing to customers wine by the glass (“wine resellers”), traditionally use 750 ml bottles or buy wine in bag in a boxes known in Australia as “cask wine”. Wine resellers need to purchase large quantities of wine in 750 ml bottles. These are transported in boxes of 12 to the wine retailer's premises where they are stored. Therefore, a lot of the transport cost and weight is in the packaging. Each 750 ml bottle contains five “standard glasses” of wine. In businesses where wine is sold by the glass, each bottle must be opened, poured, corked and recorked manually each time a glass of wine is dispensed.
Once emptied the bottles are not reused because it is uneconomic to return each bottle rewash and refill and recork for such a small container.
Therefore, there are a number of disadvantages associated with the single 750 ml bottle method of wine supply, storage and dispensing (“the single bottle system”): 1. Because of oxidation, once a bottle of wine is opened the quality of the wine remaining in the open bottle decreases rapidly. This increases the potential for wastage for wine resellers using single bottle system to store and dispense wine; 2. The single bottle system requires that employees of wine resellers manually open, dispense and recork bottles each time a glass of wine is required which is an ineffective use of time and labour at the wine resellers expense; 3. High packaging costs are incurred due to single use packaging increasing costs for both the wine retailer and the environment; 4. High transportation costs are incurred by the wine retailer because of the need to replenish stock of single bottles.
It is not an acceptable alternative to deliver wine in large “bags in a box”. It is also not acceptable to have large hidden reservoirs or use kegs in the same manner as beer, which is pumped up from the cellar to a tap on a bar. Wine is an exclusive product that needs to be treated carefully and to be presented properly. The wine purchaser needs to be assured of what is being served.
In a similar way, the dispensing of premium products such as olive oil and quality juices needs to be dispensed in a manner which gives the purchaser confidence of its quality without substantially increasing costs of dispensing.
It is therefore an object of the invention to maintain the benefits of wine storage in bottles and of the purchaser seeing the wine being dispensed from a bottle while overcoming the difficulties and expense of use of small bottles including standard 750 ml wine bottles.
It is also an object of the invention to provide an improved system and apparatus for dispensing liquid, which overcomes or at least ameliorates the problems of the prior art.